NPR’s take on longshot WV Dem

Asma Khalid’s worked up a story on a “JFK with tattoos,” a Democrat with military service hoping to win a congressional seat this cycle. The article focuses on Richard Ojeda, and the first sentence, as articles like this tend to, makes his time in the army central to his identity as a political candidate. Now, obviously, reporters engaging stories about congressional (or presidential) candidates vis-à-vis military service experience generally makes me happy. Yet, I wish more journalists understood and contextualized the district partisanship and underlying demographics. Khalid does disclose that Ojeda is swimming upstream: West Virginia was quite taken with Trump in ’16 while Romney and McCain carried it with more modest but still comfortable margins. I recently retweeted another article that was less sensitive to context that referred to Democratic veterans as a “secret weapon,” and Alexander McCoy over at Common Defense wasn’t having any of that.

I’m so tired of this trope TBH. There are some really good veteran candidates running (like Ortiz Jones), and some really bad veteran candidates running.

His take is worth repeating: vets’ DD-214 is not in itself a ticket to Election Day success. Not every candidate with a service record will be buoyed by their time in uniform. It depends heavily on the context in which they’re running. We should focus on Ojeda’s service record, sure, but he’s also what election scholars refer to as a “quality candidate,” because he’s won previous elections and served as as state legislator.